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10 Beautiful Lies About Jesus (Presented by SSA at The University of Texas Austin)

With financial support from the National SSA, our group, SSA at The University of Texas at Austin was able to fly David Fitzgerald to Austin from San Francisco to present a talk called “10 Beautiful Lies About Jesus". The talk was about the lack of historical evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ, which is the subject of Mr. Fitzgerald's book, Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed At All. During the talk, he gave an overview of what is in the book and despite technical issues that resulted in not having his (famously awesome) visual aids, Mr. Fitzgerald delivered a great talk, old-school, with just the book and his wit on stage with him.

After the talk, there was a QA session, which was lively and informative, with some follow-up, content questions and some more challenging and argumentative ones. Following the whole event, everyone was invited to have dinner at Kerbey Lane, a restaurant near cam-pus where we had a room reserved, and Mr. Fitzgerald, the members of SSA at UT Austin, and some friends and interested attendees ate, drank, and continued the conversation.

This event was the first for our group, and we think it was a success. It allowed us to show that this group will be an active one, unlike some secular/atheist organizations in the past at UT, which fizzled out due to lack of participation and motivation. However, everyone in our group has been very excited from the beginning; we got started right away on bringing in David Fitzgerald and advertising his talk all over campus. After he spoke, we had people from the Center for Inquiry come up and offer their support and resources for future events, express interest in attending future events; the Atheist Community of Austin has also said they are interested in being involved and supporting us in our events.

This talk also made our group's existence known to more students and professors on campus, which will hopefully translate into our organization growing in size and enthusiasm. We are very grateful to David Fitzgerald for coming to speak for us, to the National SSA who encouraged our new group and gave us the resources to make this event possible, and to all the people who joined us to hear Mr. Fitzgerald's great presentation.

The above article was written by Secular Student Alliance at The University of Texas Austin